Bloopers for Geeks

At 10:56 pm EDT on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. After the flight Neil said that he had intended to say “one small step for a man”. Andy and I agree that the flow of the dialog at this point in the tape suggests that Neil forgot to say the “a” and that there is little likelihood that the “a” was lost in transmission.

On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 p.m., UCLA engineering professor Leonard Kleinrock and student Charley Kline attempted to send a message from one Honeywell computer to a similar unit 600 kilometres away at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. The connection speed was 50 kb/s.

The first message was supposed to be the word “login,” but the system crashed as they typed in the letter “g.” The first message, then, was “lo.” Although it was a bumpy – if not prophetic – beginning, the researchers were able to complete the message one hour later.